A critical American view

Lost sheep

REPENT ye! cries Andrew Bacevich. With the fervour of the prophet Jeremiah, but with more wit, he denounces the profligacy of modern America. If there is one word that defines the identity of what the republic has become, he says, echoing a later prophet, Saul Bellow, it is “more”.

Mr Bacevich's strongly felt and elegantly written book is indeed a jeremiad. He claims that the constitution has been perverted by the expansion of the presidency and by national security, at the expense of Congress. Concluding that America's military power “turns out to be quite limited”, he argues that the country “doesn't need a bigger army. It needs a smaller—that is, more modest—foreign policy, one that assigns soldiers on missions that are consistent with their capabilities.”

This might sound as though his was a shrill voice of the left. It is not. Mr Bacevich is a former colonel in the American army who is now a professor of international relations and history at Boston University. But he does share much of the left's analysis of what has gone wrong. This includes both its dislike of what he calls (quoting the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr) the “most grievous temptations to self-adulation” brought about by American exceptionalism, and its perception that America has long been accumulating an empire. But he comes to these conclusions from the position of a genuine conservative.

He expresses his judgments, some grumpy, some anguished, in sharp, epigrammatic language. “A grand bazaar”, he writes, “provides an inadequate basis upon which to erect a vast empire.” Americans have recast the Jeffersonian trinity—life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—to read: “Whoever dies with the most toys wins”; “Shop till you drop”; and “If it feels good, do it.”

“Citizens”, he remarks with justice, “yearn for a restoration of a mythical Old Republic. Yet one might as well hope for the revival of the family farm or for physicians to resume making house calls.” Beginning with the election of John Kennedy, he writes, “the occupant of the White House has become a combination of demigod, father figure, and, inevitably, the betrayer of inflated hopes.”

People complain of what Arthur Schlesinger called “the imperial presidency”. But this, snorts Mr Bacevich, is “mere posturing”. For members of the political class, serving, gaining access to, reporting on, second-guessing or gossiping about the emperor-president (or about those aspiring to succeed him) has become an abiding preoccupation.

He is an acidulous critic of the incumbent administration and its military servants. Yet he does not comfort himself with the idea that the election of a new president would easily change things for the better. “No doubt the race for the presidency matters. It just doesn't matter as much as the media's obsessive coverage suggests.”

This is an astringent book and at times, like any Old Testament prophet, its author is too harsh in his demands on mere mortal politicians and generals. It is also painfully clear-sighted and refreshingly uncontaminated by the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC. Listen to Jeremiah again: “My people, saith this prophet, hath been lost sheep: their shepherds have caused them to go astray.”